Sunday, 23 February 2014

There's always some debate about how to rank the medal tally of all the countries. Some news outlets rank by number of gold. The second option is to tally the total bronze, silver, and gold. CBC chose to rank by pure gold, which puts Canada in third and USA fourth, while NBC took the total count, which places USA second and Canada fourth. Hmmm. How about we try a points system, where Gold = 3 points, Silver = 2, and Bronze = 1. This takes a middle ground where runner-up performances still count while admitting gold ought to be worth more than bronze. In this case here's the Sochi 2014 medal table:

Russia is the clear winner with 70 points, while Canada's 55 points edges out Norway and the United States who are tied third with 53. The overall rankings are only tweaked a little, which is good not to upset the apple cart entirely. One modification I could suggest is to count team sports for more points since it's impossible for a given country to sweep the medals (i.e. Canada's men's hockey team can win at most one gold while the Netherlands can, and have, won multiple medals per event). Then again sweeping the podium is an equal opportunity event hence I'm not going to change the table.

I forgot to mention a third way people rank the olympics, which is dividing that countries' population by the metal count to 'normalize' the rankings. You could do that here too, but with points instead of using the (oversimplified) medal count. Here's the rankings again with a points per capita:

No surprise that Norway is the clear winner with 10.3 points per million people; on average every 100,000, or a tiny city in Norway, generates an Olympic point. Slovenia and Switzerland rank in second and third, which I would not have considered intuitive choices. Meanwhile Canada and Russia slip all the way down to ninth and 14th, respectively (I kept the original rank numeration so you can see how much shifting there is). No surprise that China sits in dead last for winter, but maybe if we tried doing this with London 2012 something interesting could emerge. But that's for another post.

Sunday, 16 February 2014

My first reaction was there wasn't much correlation between either how many medals the country actually won and how much the athlete got paid for gold. Nor is it clear how much these athletes get paid, if anything, when not winning gold. Most likely the wealthier countries pay their athletes some stipend when training. Then again, poorer countries may have elite training programs, assuming you qualify for one such as Russia's Red Army.

Nevertheless, since winning gold is rarely, if ever, a reliable source of income I figured these cash prizes were a form of saving face for the countries themselves and less so for rewarding athletes. It's as if to say "look, we don't shortchange our athletes, at least if they are winning". I wondered if there was a correlation between the prize money and the general wealth of these countries per capita. Hence I took the figure 1 prize values and plotted them against GDP.

Figure 2: Olympic prize money compared with GDP per capita wealth per country

The correlation is not perfect, but the results are relatively clear: poorer countries give relatively more money to the winning athletes than richer ones. My guess is that these athletes make little money and to avoid the embarrassment of having a gold medalist living in poverty, it would be wiser from a publicity point of view to reward them enough to live comfortably in future years, or at least until they are forgotten.

There is a deeper significance to the negative correlation in figure 2. Wealthier countries can potentially afford larger medal prizes than poorer ones. And poorer countries don't win enough medals for these payouts to be a significant cash drain. Hence the absolute money given out to athletes is rather arbitrary. Canada pays out $20,000 per gold medal. This is a pittance when you consider the years of effort required to earn one. An annual graduate stipend in a canadian science program is more than 20 grand, which is also small, and there are a lot more graduate students than Olympics athletes in Canada. The majority of legitimate money comes from sponsorship deals like commercials and public appearances for talks. Is this a good point in favour of capitalism in amateur sports? I need to look into this a little deeper.